


Saints' and Sinners' Lies and Laws

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: The Folly of the World - Jesse Bullington
Genre: Bad Ending, Breathplay, Canon-Typical Foul Language, Eels, Eels in Orifices, Eroticized Death, Forced Marriage, Inappropriate Use of Eels, M/M, Ritual Marriage to Summon an Eldritch Horror, Ritual Sex, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:29:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25537351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Marriage is a ritual. And rituals may be used for good or ill. Unfortunately for Sander, and fortunately for Jan, this one's probably the latter.
Relationships: Sander Himbrecht/Jan Tieselen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3
Collections: Just Married Exchange 2020





	Saints' and Sinners' Lies and Laws

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seinmit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/gifts).



So, he wasn’t getting out of it this time. 

That was the problem with being held captive by someone who knew you on an intimate level and who, you were starting to realize, you’d never really known at all. You couldn’t get out, even if you really wanted to, and in that way, it was worse than the hangman’s noose, or a good, honest fight with some prick in the street. And the terrible thing was that, in some hideous way, Sander wasn’t really sure he wanted to escape. 

Oh, he wanted Jolanda to escape this, and he was pretty sure that right now, she was rowing as fast as she could away from Dordrecht, off to some new life on a bag of money. Sander hoped she’d go far, far away. Maybe England or France. She’d learn the language and make a decent go of it, he was sure. Anything would be better than Dordrecht, and Belgians, and eels. He trusted Jo to make it out fine, or at least as fine as possible. She had her sword and she knew how to use it. 

He didn’t even remotely trust Jan. Jan Tieselen had always been a sly bastard, and Sander had 

loved him for it, but now he mostly just wanted to know why he wouldn’t fucking die, and what exactly he was doing with the Belgians and the Hand of Glory and all those plaguebitch eels. Mostly, though, he wanted to ignore the pain in his side as the boat foundered against something hard. 

Jan prodded him with a foot, and in happier days, Sander probably would have thought the gesture an affectionate one. The boat shuddered again, and Sander’s head hit hard against the side. He wanted to scramble up and see something besides the cloud-sodden sky or the slow way darkness fell in the seasonless nothingness left by the flood,, but he couldn’t. His limbs were bound and he only had one hand. 

Jan was kneeling now, pressing his hand against Sander’s clammy forehead in the way he’d done before when they were running together. Then, it had definitely been affectionate, maybe even a little bit overbearing. Now, it kind of made Sander’s skin crawl. Even aside from his bound limbs, the touch just didn’t feel right. Jan’s hands were slick and sweaty, as though they’d been covered with a thin layer of mucus. 

“It’s a pity you couldn’t have brought something a little nicer,” he said, lifting at the neckline of Sander’s tunic, and making a face. He dropped it, but not before he’d pulled back hard enough to cut into Sander’s breathing just a little, making him twitch. “No one should be married in rags.” 

Married? That was a new one. Sander was too surprised to move as Jan cut the rope around his hand. His stump throbbed in its dirty bandaging, and he wanted to do nothing so much as push Jan over the edge and use the oar to keep him down until he could figure out just how much pressure it took to make him sink. Except he couldn’t, because even with everything, he still kind of wanted Jan to kill him. Maybe. It had been a promise, and sure, he was getting a little hard thinking about the idea even now, which seemed frankly unfair. Especially with Jan bringing up marriage, which was pretty fucking baffling. And anyhow, he only had one hand, which would definitely make the business of bludgeoning that much more difficult. 

“We don’t have witnesses,” he said at last, immediately feeling as though he’d said something particularly stupid. “You can’t marry without witnesses or a priest.” 

That was even without the whole business of them both being men. 

“We have witnesses,” Jan said. “Stand up.” 

He didn’t mention the priest bit, which, more than the complete fucking absurdity of the situation in general, probably scared Sander most of all. But Sander still stood up, feeling off-balance and a little woozy. The boat rocked. A drop of rain fell from the roiling clouds and he felt it hit his face. The air seemed suddenly, unbearably still. Dark sky, dark water, the dark steeple of the church rising above them like an accusing finger. It made Sander think, irrationally, of his da, and then of the gallows. It would be easy, at this point, to dive overboard and take his chances, see if he could hit dry land or at least a somewhat uncovered roof. But the waters were Jan’s, or they belonged to whatever thing he served, and Sander had never been very fond of the darkness, or the slimy feel of cold, still waters. 

Even so, he hadn’t really expected Jan to shove him and didn’t really register it until he hit. There was a sudden pressure at his chest, a backwards tipping, and then the cold, dark embrace of the water. He flailed, sightless, handless, cold biting like steel, but where he should have gone up, he could only go down, down, down. His feet touched, finally, on the steps of the church, and despite the water all around him, he opened his mouth, lungs screaming for air. If he was going to die strangled, he thought a bit wildly, this wasn’t how he’d envisioned it. Death by drowning had never been in the plans. 

The water didn’t seem like water anymore, he realized. Sander could get air, a strange, syrupy air coming in through the water he swallowed. But there was still the matter of darkness, or at least there was until he blinked and opened his eyes. A strange, green light came from the inside of the church, and to make matters even worse and even odder, he thought he could hear whispering coming from within. Sound, he thought, shouldn’t carry like that in the water. It shouldn’t slide and hiss and encircle him like tendrils of seaweed or grass long rotted by floodwaters. 

“It’s all been done up for the graaf,” hissed Jan in his ear, and Sander, to his credit, managed to keep himself from leaping too far out of his skin. “And his wedding night. It would be best if we didn’t keep them waiting.” 

Every step towards the church’s altar felt like walking through mud, or deep snow as he tried to plod a, but he managed to get himself up and through the door. Jan, beside him, seemed to slither through the water, cutting it like a knife. Or an eel. _Neuking revenant cunt,_ Sander thought sourly as he stood in the aisle, looking around. 

It was just an ordinary village church, albeit one full of water, with piles of debris rising like strange statuary in the greenish gloom. The pews, too, were filled with lumpen shapes that seemed more and more like they might have been human once as Sander’s eyes adjusted to the unnatural half-light and the more natural gloom. He finally got a closer look and tried not to jump. All he could think was that it was probably a good thing that Jan was going to kill him, because otherwise, the sight was going to haunt his dreams forever. The pews were full of skeletons, all of them hunched over as though they’d been blown in by a wind, or swept over by a raging tide. And all of them were writhing with eels. They moved in a sleepy, anticipatory undulation, almost swaying with the water’s gentle eddies, and Sander felt suddenly, violently sick. 

The green light was coming from the altar, a bright coin of light that cast the rest of the church into a penumbral, watery gloom. He couldn’t see the ceiling, and the pillars seemed not unlike the trees of the drowned willow forest in their masses. A forest, he thought, underwater. A church glowing with unholy light. Skeletal parishioners garbed with eels in a mockery of life. Whatever it was that was happening, it was going to drive him mad. But he still let Jan lead him to the altar, surrounded by the hissing whispers that came from a place Sander couldn’t quite make out. 

“Fuck,” Sander said softly, because it wasn’t like there was much else he could say. He couldn’t pray to anything in this building, under so many layers of water, and it wasn’t until they stood before the altar, nearly blinded, that the whisperings from all around him left Sander’s ears. 

Then, Jan started to pray. They weren’t any words Sander had ever heard, but he thought that maybe, if he strained his ears a bit, he could make it all sound a bit like the Belgians’ talk out in the marshes. Or the sound a fish makes when it splashes up out of its submarine world and slaps back down into the depths. Either way, it didn’t sound good. 

When he’d finished his prayer or invocation or whatever the fuck it was, he turned to Sander, joined their hands, and said something about joining two into one to bring All into the world. Sander didn’t know what All was. He didn’t want to find out. 

“Do you take Jan Tieselen as your legitimate husband?” Jan asked. 

Sander wasn’t exactly sure what to say. All of this was definitely weird, and definitely wrong, and he couldn't exactly refuse Jan, considering that he was probably the only thing keeping Sander breathing under the water. 

“Yeah,” he said. 

“And I take you, Sander Himbrecht, as mine. So I pronounce us married, in the eyes of the presence here.” 

That was it. They were married, Sander guessed, inasmuch as two men could be married, and that probably meant he was going to die. Well, now was as good as a time as any to do it, and he was ready for it. Jan had always promised to help with that particular bit of Sander’s fantasy, and now that he was, apparently, Sander’s husband, the least he could do was keep his own word. Sander tugged awkwardly at his tunic’s collar, trying to expose his neck. 

Then, the eels twining in the skeletons started to really move. They surged out of the pews, up towards them, a wall of grey and black that broke around Sander and Jan. Were they celebrating, in some perverse way? Sander didn’t have time to question it before the eels were swarming. They slithered around him like a choking, thick slime, and he could barely move as they pulsed and prodded at him, one wriggling up his tunic as he squirmed. It left slimy trails along his body even in the water, and he couldn’t help but think about everything he’d ever heard about eel’s blood being poisonous. 

“What is this?” he cried, looking at Jan wildly before the eels pulsed their way into his mouth, filling it with slime and the salty-rotten taste of low tide, cutting off his voice before he could protest again. It writhed in his mouth, and definitely tasted a lot worse than anything that he’d ever put in there. There was something nearly febrile about it. 

Jan looked at him, his eyes bright with some kind of godforsaken corpselight glow to them. 

“They’re precious, aren’t they? You’ve married them too. You married us and you’re going to bring something wonderful into the world.” 

Sander let out a “mmmph” of protest around the eel wriggling in his mouth. Christ Jesus, the thing was going to his throat, and all he could think was that his cock was hard. Was this really where he was at? Marrying Jan in a perfunctory ceremony, only to wind up strangled by a cunting eel? 

There was another eel working its way up under his tunic and hose, and that was kind of hell too, but fuck if it didn’t feel good. Sander moaned. The eels continued apace, and all the while Jan grinned, as though he liked seeing Sander like this, lying in a church and fucked by eels. Then, Sander felt a sort of nudging at his hole, and he definitely would’ve screamed had he not been filled full of eels at both ends. He could only mumble and drool, his mind ablaze with a panic none of the water around could quench, even as he ached with arousal. 

And all the while, Jan watched, smiling at Sander, immobilized in his cloud of eels. Then, with a snap of his fingers that was definitely too audible, the eels dispersed, sliding out of Sander in a decidedly unnatural gush. and it was Jan’s turn. Sander fell, panting hard, but the water slowed his fall enough for Jan to guide him gently down onto the altar. He lay there, and then Jan was fiddling with his own hose, pushing them down, and lining himself up with Sander’s raised arse. He thrust in with a kind of gentle brutality that Sander hadn’t expected at all. Almost like old times, really. 

Everything from there went into a blur. The slime from the eels must have slicked up his passage pretty well, maybe better than cod oil, and Jan was tender about everything, even as his hands ghosted over Sander’s throat, reaching down to press upon it, depriving him of breath so that stars danced before his eyes. He was coming before he knew it, watching himself spend into the swirling water. And all the while, the eels hovered, watching the consummation. 

Fucked out and breathless, Sander almost didn’t notice the change when it finally happened, the way the water grew more watery with every thrust of Jan’s suspiciously eely cock. He was nearly insensate by the time Jan pulled out, only noticing as Jan called him husband, pulled him in for a kiss that stole his breath, even as he wrapped his hands, clutching the garrote-like eel around Sander’s neck. The water wavered, but it might have been the lack of air making him a little mad, or it might have been something churning in the deeps. Even so, by the time Sander saw the many eyed and many tendrilled shadow rising in the dark hole where the crucifix had been, he was already slipping under, and into the welcome, writhing darkness. A final kiss, a final gasp, and it was over. Sander sank towards nothingness, and it was probably for the best. If he’d been alive to watch the thing rise in the water, he probably would have screamed in earnest. 

**Author's Note:**

> Medieval weddings were not necessarily particularly formal. You needed to say you were married, and a couple of witnesses, and a priest, basically. Sure, the priest here is Jan, the god involved is a nebulous eldritch horror, and the witnesses are eels and skeletons, but that counts, right? (As a side note: medieval views on common law marriage are really fascinating, but that is probably an endnote linkspam for another day). This ceremony here bears some resemblance to an _affrèrement_ , which was mostly a Mediterranean thing rather than a Northern European one, but I figured that in a fic involving people getting fucked with eels to raise an eldritch horror, strict geographic historical accuracy probably wasn't the most necessary thing here. Hope you enjoy the fic! 
> 
> Title is from Robert Graves' "In the Beginning Was a Word."


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